From a song by Green Day

Nobody likes you
Everyone left you
They’re all out without you havin’ fun
Where’d you go
Everyone left you
Nobody likes you
They’re all out without you havin’ fun
Where’d you go?

That you is me, and the They is AppleCare. I’m not turning into an emo-kid, don’t worry.

I called them a few weeks before my warranty expired, because there was a known battery problem, and also a motherboard problem, from which I got a new battery free and a case number for a replacement motherboard.

Subsequently I though… “oh” my warranty’s out soon isn’t it, so rang AppleCare, only to be told that because of the purchase date being way before the delivery date I was already out of warranty.

My bad? Not so sure, but they gave me a new motherboard case number (because apparantly the first guy got it wrong) but refused to sell me an extension to my AppleCare, because I was a couple of days out of date… and because I was fairly sure I was told I would be rung to be told this and offered the sale. I told the guy – I want to give you £300 but they were having none of it, and arrgh… not happy.

My power cable has since disintegrated and will not power on my laptop; I’m going to have to either shell out £80 for a new one from Apple (will it last?) or take my chances and bide my time on eBay hoping that whatever I get works and doesn’t turn out to be a dud or a 1st generation power adapter.

It leaves me with a really bad taste in my mouth… Ricey says I shoulda been tougher months ago… Maybe so, but as someone who purchased a first generation product I would’ve expected to be shown a bit of love; but no – they know this product is flawed (when will my hard drive spin down to nothing?) and will break then I’ll be completely stuck.

Time to get some alternative insurance!

When I saw a link to the ‘Jamaica Constabulary Force‘ on the bbc news website I knew it had to be good. I hope you agree!

Fantastic man.

David Lowry is very unhappy at having chosen to and continued to use the blogging/cms software serendipity s9y to do a project.

Very, very regretful.

Anthro make chairs and desks….

Click here (req’s real player) to watch BBC East Midlands’ broadcast this evening; my camera work (and editing!) on the bbc! :)

Now, where’s my royalties….?

(keywords)

What happens when you don’t install an Alesis sound mixer properly and then try to digitise from a firewire video device…

h3. Alesis MultiMix ASIO Drivers

If you have installed the basic drivers for an Alesis MultiMix device (ASIO Drivers) for use with Cubase LE or whatever other sound program you choose and THEN tried to upgrade those drivers to the newer Mac OS X Intel versions, which has a new System Preferences widget you may enounter problems if you don’t follow the directions exactly.

*QUOTE from “readme io24-26 Mac Update.pdf”*

B. SECOND STEP: IF NECESSARY, REMOVE YOUR MAC
DRIVERS
Only if you also own an Alesis MultiMix FireWire and you have not updated your drivers since August 2006:

Open the disk image 1 – Alesis Mac Driver 1.5d0.dmg. Then, open the “Audio Driver” volume. Use Alesis1394Clean to remove your current drivers.

Note: in some cases, this application will report that no drivers were found, even if drivers were installed on your system. In this case, there is no need to uninstall earlier drivers. Proceed to step “C,” below.

*END QUOTE*

This may not even work right. Use spotlight search review to find all files containing ‘Alesis’ and if they infer that they are drivers Apple-Click on them (to open their containing folder) and remove. Clear your Trash and restart. This will let the default Firewire drivers take over, and your Camcorder (etc.) will be allowed to work again.

Phew, thought I’d broken something.

——–

*edit:* RE: a earch result

h3. “remove alesis multimix from system preferences”

I haven’t got the *original_ Multimix to remove from the OS X System Preferences, but the new one (from the updated version of the drivers) removed easily when you “uninstall” / remove the Package.

Just back from the Elite League Playoff Finals in Nottingham with Barney. Once we got there we worked out what we were meant to do (these things are nearly always a mystery…) two cameras – one fixed centre-ice, another roving. Plenty of crowd work, plenty of vox pops and coach/player interviews.

Wayne and Nigel (Downtown, etc.) provided commentary for our recording; we used the Canon HLX1 and Sony PD170 from previous Giants work, along with Matt’s (the Giants music man) Alesis MultiMax 16. I want one (trying to find a second excuse to purchase…).

Straight from DV DVDs provided to BBC and ITV (there’s one for the CV) and to the teams of all three matches; and my first ever expenses paid trip of any kind made for a good weekend.

As the playoffs…

Playoff Champions Nottingham Panthers won (2-1 on pens after 1-1) vs Cardiff Devils.
(Semi 1 Devils beat Blaze 3-2 in regulation time)
(Semi 2 Panthers beat Giants on pens after 1-1)

The boss got a call in Spain the other day asking if we’d mind flying to Nottingham to shoot the Play-off Finals over the weekend… Don’t mind! :-)

So, sacrificing guaranteed Grand Prix watching time (and Rob’s stag do, whatever air-soft fun that was going to entail :-/) Me and Barney are flying over to the East Midlands to do some vox pops, record all four games, record commentary all in preparation for (it appears) another Giants DVD!

There will be no live broadcasts of the games (not from us anyway) but I’ll post DVD details here (and it’ll be all over the four team’s websites too) of where you can sign up for buying the Official DVDs for the playoffs.